Léa Seydoux: The sex scenes in Blue Is The Warmest Colour were humiliating to shoot

The first time I met Léa Seydoux was at last year’s London Film Festival, when the busy French star was nervously ‘looking forward’ to watching her new film, Blue Is The Warmest Colour.

Making the loose adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, about a high-school girl’s lesbian love affair with an older, blue-haired art student (Adèle Exarchopoulos and Seydoux respectively), had been ‘extremely difficult’, she said, describing the three-hour, intimately photographed drama’s explicit sex scenes as ‘humiliating’ and ‘gross’ to shoot. ‘You have to be out of your body. It’s too difficult,’ she sighed.

Almost a year to the day, we’re talking on the phone while Seydoux is tied up filming a biopic of Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. It is fair to say a lot has happened in those 12 months.

Blue Is The Warmest Colour premiered to (almost) universal acclaim at Cannes. It made festival history when a jury led by Steven Spielberg awarded the Palme d’Or jointly to the actresses and the film’s Tunisian-French
director, Abdellatif Kechiche.

Publicly, there were smiles and tears of joy. But, as my interview last year revealed, that wasn’t the whole story. It wasn’t long before comments made by Seydoux and Exarchopoulos to journalists about Kechiche’s gruelling working methods ignited an ugly spat with the film-maker.

Seydoux complained that she was made to feel like a ‘prostitute’. Kechiche, meanwhile, told France’s Télérama magazine that the film shouldn’t be released because it had been ‘sullied’ by the controversy and, more recently, appeared to threaten legal action against the actress.

In truth, Seydoux knew Blue… would be hard. When she met Kechiche to discuss the project, he asked her to read the graphic novel first. ‘He wanted to see if I was OK with all the scenes,’ she says, ‘and I was.’

Seydoux felt scared but this was normal. Despite being hand-picked by Woody Allen for Midnight In Paris and by Tom Cruise for Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, ‘I’m never sure of myself,’ the 28-year-old confesses. ‘I always feel like I’m starting from zero. And sometimes, I’m like: “No, Léa. Don’t forget that you’ve worked with Woody Allen, de-dah, de-dah, de-dah.” But I’m just always so scared and I have to hope I will be able to do it.’

Even so, she likes the idea of taking risks. When Blue… came along, ‘I wanted to go far in a character,’ she says. ‘I wanted to, like, explore and expose myself. And even the sex scenes… I wanted to experience how it would be to shoot things like that.’

Seydoux had limits, though. She told Kechiche that she wouldn’t smoke real cigarettes because she had recently quit and wouldn’t wear her own clothes or allow him to change her character’s name to Léa. (‘It’s not possible. I need to have a distance.’) Thereafter, his word was absolute. ‘You have to give everything. And if you don’t give everything, you’re fired.’

She was expecting to be challenged. ‘But I didn’t know that he was totally, totally obsessed by the film.’ says Seydoux. ‘He could do scenes 200 times and I didn’t know that at the start.’

An extended sex scene between the actresses reportedly took ten days to shoot. They weren’t completely naked, though, despite appearances. ‘We had pretend p***ies,’ she says, giggling. ‘So it was easier because it was like protection between us and made it more comfortable.’

All the while, Kechiche was trying to make the actors lose themselves, to create the feeling that everything in the film is happening in the moment.

‘That’s what I love about his cinema,’ Seydoux admits. ‘It’s not a fabrication; it’s just like how it is.’ However, it put her in conflict with herself. ‘I had to be the character and give everything, but, at the same time, I had to protect myself. It was like an existentialist experience.’

The actresses became increasingly exhausted by the constant repetitions and Kechiche’s demands for realism. The toughest part, says Seydoux, was never knowing how long filming was going to last.

‘Kechiche has tons of ideas, so he was like, “Now we will try to shoot this and that.” He even wanted to go to New York, I remember, and do some scenes,’ she reveals, laughing. ‘We couldn’t see the end. It was always like, “OK, we’re going to push the shooting. It’s going to be one month more.” And then it was two. Then three. We didn’t know.’

Filming eventually lasted five-and-a-half months, during which time they had to put their outside lives and friendships on hold.

Did Seydoux ever feel like quitting? ‘Sometimes, yes. But I spent a year with the director, I cut my hair, I dyed my hair, and I gave my heart. Once you have given your heart and you’re totally involved, it’s difficult to leave a project.’

Ultimately, the piece of art is what matters. And while Seydoux has reservations about the way Blue Is The Warmest Colour was made, she is justifiably pleased with the outcome.

‘I’m happy the film exists and I’m happy it had the success [in Cannes].’ she says. ‘I’m happy about the work Abdell and I did. We worked hard for the film.’

Blue Is The Warmest Colour opens on November 22.

Out of the blue: Metro’s film editor Larushka Ivan-Zadeh examines what the fuss is about…

Critics adored this three-hour exploration of teenage sexuality at Cannes – Steven Spielberg’s jury awarded it the Palme d’Or. But the graphic, full-frontal lesbian sex scenes – one of which goes on for nearly eight minutes – raised eyebrows.

The New York Times criticised the way director Abdellatif Kechiche ogled his nubile stars with his hand-held camera, saying: ‘The camera and its misuses… could fill pages.’

Julie Maroh, French author of the original graphic novel, blogged that its adaptation was ‘a brutal and surgical display of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn’.

The crew who worked on the film alleged that Kechiche had violated union codes with ‘workdays of 16 hours reported as eight’ and a ‘bullying’ atmosphere on set.

About three months after smiling on the red carpet at Cannes, the film’s young female stars, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, spoke out about the ‘horrible’ conditions of their gruelling shoot in an interview with the Daily Beast, in particular the sex scenes where, they revealed, fake genitals where used.

‘Most people wouldn’t even dare to ask the things that he [Kechiche] did,’ said Exarchopoulos.